Related papers: Programming Refusal with Conditional Activation St…

The field of large language models (LLMs) has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by the desire for better efficiency, interpretability, and safe use. Building on the novel approach of "activation engineering," this study explores…

Recent advances in automated theorem proving use Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate informal mathematical statements into formal proofs. However, informal cues are often ambiguous or lack strict logical structure, making it hard for…

Large language models (LLMs) often encode cognitive behaviors unpredictably across prompts, layers, and contexts, making them difficult to diagnose and control. We present CBMAS, a diagnostic framework for continuous activation steering,…

Activation-based steering enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to exhibit targeted behaviors by intervening on intermediate activations without retraining. Despite its widespread use, the mechanistic factors that govern when steering…

Although Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on downstream tasks, they frequently produce contents that deviate from visual information, leading to object hallucination. To tackle this, recent works…

Inference-time LLM alignment methods, particularly activation steering, offer an alternative to fine-tuning by directly modifying activations during generation. Existing methods, however, often rely on non-anticipative interventions that…

Activation steering is a practical post-training model alignment technique to enhance the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs). Prior to deploying a model as a service, developers can steer a pre-trained model toward specific behavioral…

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) generate text via iterative masked-token denoising, enabling mask-parallel decoding and distinct controllability and efficiency tradeoffs from autoregressive LLMs. Yet, efficient representation-level…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used by software engineers for programming tasks. However, research shows that LLMs often lack a deep understanding of program semantics. Even minor changes to syntax, such as renaming variables, can…

Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, \textit{compositional steering} --…

Precise control over language model generation is vital for ensuring both safety and reliability. Although prompt engineering and steering are commonly used to intervene in model behaviors, the vast number of parameters in models often…

Activation steering is a method for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behavior by intervening in its internal representations to increase the alignment with a specific target feature direction. However, standard interventions, such as…

As large language models (LLMs) improve in their capacity to serve as personal AI assistants, their ability to output uniquely tailored, personalized responses that align with the soft preferences of their users is essential for enhancing…

Activation steering provides parameter-efficient control over large language models (LLMs) at inference time, but many methods rely on off-distribution supervision and discrete masking, leading to brittle interventions. We propose ROAST…

Activation steering has emerged as a powerful tool to shape LLM behavior without the need for weight updates. While its inherent brittleness and unreliability are well-documented, its safety implications remain underexplored. In this work,…

Activation steering methods were shown to be effective in conditioning language model generation by additively intervening over models' intermediate representations. However, the evaluation of these techniques has so far been limited to…

Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically secured by auditing data, prompts, and refusal policies, while treating the forward pass as an implementation detail. We show that intermediate activations in decoder-only LLMs form a…

Tool use extends large language models beyond parametric knowledge, but reliable execution requires balancing appropriate reasoning depth with strict structural validity. We approach this problem from a case-based perspective to present…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear why it works and whether it is the unique mechanism for triggering reasoning in large language models. In this…

Controlling the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge due to their inherent complexity and opacity. While techniques like fine-tuning can modify model behavior, they typically require extensive…